The Kissing List

by Stephanie Reents

  You’d like to talk to him and to Calvin Hill, and the soccer player, and all the other kids whom you passed wordlessly in the hallway. You’d like to know what those claustrophobic years were like for them. Back then, you divided the world into hardworking versus brilliant, smart versus intellectual, partier versus straight, good kids versus bad kids. Your categories were so fucking narrow! You joked with your friends, “These are the best years of our lives,” as though everyone else was having a grand old time. It never occurred to you that the soccer player might have felt just as miserable as you did when Yale wrote, “We regret to inform you …” Or that Calvin Hill might have spent the rest of junior high and high school feeling sorry for you. Maybe he could see how lonely you were: having a sweetheart at the tender age of thirteen might have helped you blossom. Or maybe breaking into your locker was just one episode in a series of gutsy things he did to woo other girls. It’s also possible the whole incident has simply vanished, been buried beneath twenty years of more memorable experiences: seeing his college girlfriend’s long black hair spread across a feather pillow, watching the sun burst out from a quilt of clouds on a backpacking trip through the River of No Return, standing to applaud his son’s debut performance as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream …

  Obama’s right-hand man has probably forgotten you too.

  You wonder what else you have misremembered or been too immersed in your own experience to see. The mother of a friend sends you photos from May Queen, your high school formal, and studying these three pictures—perhaps for the first time, you’re not sure—it’s hard to deny those weren’t pretty good years, not the best, but not the worst either. The pictures make it look like a teen flick, with the boys in white tails and black tuxedos with red cummerbunds, except for one feathered-hair rebel who is dressed in Levi’s and a blue sports coat, and girls in outfits ranging from puffy satin confections to floral dresses with drop waists. A girl whom you could never figure out because she was smart and quiet but also once suggested floating a picnic table down the river has on white saltwater sandals. You love that choice. Everyone is decorated: with sprays of white and pink flowers, buttonhole roses, a burst of yellow forsythia. Once again, you show verve and a grave misunderstanding of school fashion by wearing a peach-colored culottes romper and a wide white stretchy belt.

  The shocking thing about seeing these photos is how little you remember of the evening: not the dinner at Ginny Simm’s house, a friend who predated Rhadika, a friend whom you loved because she looked like Laura from Little House on the Prairie and once wrote a forty-five-page sequel to Little Women; not how this motley group of kids came to have dinner at Ginny’s house, since by senior year you and Ginny had drifted into different social spheres. Heck, you don’t even remember your date’s first name, just his last, Leavitt, though you do recall asking ______ Leavitt to the dance (it was Sadie Hawkins style) and the machinations you had to go through to first disinvite another fellow who flirted shamelessly with you but clearly preferred another girl. The dance is also a blank—did you slow dance? If so, did you like it? You do have a shard of recollection that you and Leavitt hung out with his friends afterward. You know for sure that you didn’t kiss, but you have a hunch that you came close, that there were some awkward moments when you were both aware of your bodies’ proximities, where you both wondered what to do.

  Is not kissing and telling as much a foul as kissing and telling?

  Because Rhadika is in these photos you forward them to her. After several days, she e-mails back with some choice comments about late-eighties fashion—Rhadika is a very good writer even in the usually sloppy mode of e-mail. She adds: “I seem to recall we got really drunk that night.”

  Wait, what? You don’t remember drinking that night. It is a point of old nerdy pride that you rarely drank in high school—once the summer before senior year with the boy from down the street (who will remain nameless) who sometimes goaded you, the Goody Two-Shoes, into doing slightly forbidden things like biking out to the airport after dark and crawling under the fence to watch the planes take off and land. That time, it was champagne, not an ideal first alcoholic beverage because it’s easy to drink too much. Another time it was beer with the boys from the basketball team. You didn’t really like the taste, but that didn’t stop you from having a draft at the ACTU (the neon C and S were burned out) with a kid whom you kissed on the golf course in the rich part of town. Finally, there were the wine coolers you drank in the parking lot at the school-sponsored all-night graduation party, organized, you suppose, with the idea of keeping drinking to a minimum. (Dear Mom and Dad, if you’re reading this, remember that I was pretty good most of the time.)

  For the record, you’re sure, or 85 percent sure, that you did not get really drunk after the May Queen dance with ____ Leavitt, whom you did not kiss, but maybe wanted to, and Rhadika and her date, who, you’ve heard via your mother, has become something of a Republican bigwig in local politics. (Ah, the deliciousness of liberal Rhadika attending May Queen with a budding Republican!) Either 85 or 80 percent sure, which is pretty sure. You begin to wonder what else Rhadika is writing about junior high and high school, all those years you faithfully shared a locker. Will she tell the world you were messy? (You were.) Will she remember how the two of you decided you were weird on the outside (because you wore men’s V-neck sweaters backwards, the aforementioned culottes, and dresses fashioned out of dyed pillowcases) and she was weird on the inside (because she wore jeans and Izods with her collar popped but wrote strange, moving poems). Will she quote the words of your theme song by Tom Petty: “Hey! Don’t come around here no more … I’ve given up. Stop! I’ve given up waiting any longer.” Will she describe the legend of the purple jelly bean, the details of which you have forgotten? Will she recall what she did for you on your Sweet Sixteen—the vases of daffodils waiting for you in each classroom, so that by the end of the day you could not carry them all. Like love, they seemed boundless.

  Will she also remember the fierce competition between the two of you? According to your adolescent accounting, she was naturally smart, and you worked very hard. She starred in school plays; you played power forward on the basketball team. She was student body secretary; you were History Club president. You took calculus, she took AP Physics. She applied to one Ivy League, you to another. Will all this jockeying for position figure into the chapters devoted to ages thirteen to eighteen? Scientists say that memories of bad things are more tenacious than those of good ones. Jealousy, insecurity, anger, fear—you can no longer remember all the reasons for the feelings—but these emotions never go away completely. This is why you will not be surprised if you learn that you are only a minor character in the section on her teenage years—or even, to find no trace of yourself at all.

  A new noise captured my attention: the sound of someone driving a nail into sheet metal. I couldn’t stop listening to it, and I couldn’t stop shaking. Each time the nail was struck, vibrations moved from my head, down through my arms and legs, out the tips of my toes and fingers, and into the air. I glanced around the living room, expecting to see ordinary objects like the coffee table and the bookshelves and the fringed lampshade reflecting the way I felt, but everything seemed normal, except for the woman in the African batik, whose beaded headdress began to streak like tears down her head and neck. I closed my eyes, and the pounding continued for what seemed like hours until gradually the sound became gentler, and I realized that it was noon, and someone was knocking.

  Very few people came to my door because my house was hidden. It was off the street, across a gravel lot, and through a gate that swelled in the heat and rain and would not budge unless you threw your weight against it. The path from the gate to the house was blocked by an overgrown pomegranate bush covered with rotting fruit that had been recently infested with small black bugs. When I left the fruit unpicked, I imagined flocks of dark birds covering the small bush and pecking at the dry husks. The person at my door had most likely walked un
derneath the pomegranate bush, oblivious to the threat of the bugs raining down—not that this had happened, but I imagined it happening. I had grown accustomed to always expecting the worst, except for the flock of birds, which would have been beautiful, like a handful of confetti suspended in the sky.

  I eased myself up from the couch. My pants were damp. This was not unusual; the pain that pinned me to the couch was so intense that I often lost control of different things. It was as though my body still wept, even though I no longer cried.

  Through the front window, I saw a woman without a head. I pressed my knuckles into my eyes, hoping that when the static cleared she would be gone, though I didn’t count on it. In my experience, the universe was more apt to bring things than to take them away, and just as I expected, the woman remained. Her shoulders were like an empty table, an unexpected horizontal line. Her T-shirt wasn’t crooked, even though she had no neck to anchor it. I squinted. In one hand, she cradled her head as if it were a baby, while with the other, she rapped steadily on the door. Suddenly she stopped knocking and lifted her head up to the screen and swiveled it back and forth, taking everything in.

  “Hello,” she said. “Anyone home?”

  I screamed.

  “Am I catching you at a bad time?” she asked, as if by screaming, I’d told her nothing more than that she was inconveniencing me. “I can come back …”

  I tiptoed back to the couch, but behind me I heard the door opening. I screamed again.

  “I can come back,” the woman repeated, now standing in my living room in front of a poster of impressionistic pastel-colored sunbathers that my nurse had brought to cheer things up.

  I turned and faced her. She was holding her head in both hands and nodding it up and down. A red cooler was at her feet. There was a chance I could escape; though I moved as if the ground shifted beneath me like choppy water, she would surely be slowed by having to navigate without her head in its normal place.

  “If there’s a better time …” She trailed off.

  She was so polite that I started to feel inhospitable. And also curious. The truth was, I wanted her to go away. But I also wanted to know how she got by. She reminded me of a blind man I’d met who took photographs. He didn’t even pretend he could see; he usually held his camera right under his chin or above his head. When the film was developed, he asked people to describe the pictures to him. “I had a sense,” he’d say about every image. He photographed me eating lunch. I was having a bad year, but that day was especially bad because I couldn’t stop thinking about the MRI I had scheduled for the following week, when I’d find out whether any new tumors had germinated in my skull. I was wearing a silk scarf instead of the long red wig that everyone admired, because it was very hot, the hottest week on record since the summer of 1927. The next day, the blind man appeared at my table, where I was trying to stay cool by sipping tea, and handed me a white envelope. “I have a sense that you’re sad,” he said. “But melancholia is exquisite.” We talked for a while, and later we went to bed. Often, before I had an MRI, I’d wind up in bed with someone—sometimes a stranger, sometimes a friend around whom I’d been too shy—aroused by my fear that it could be my last intimate act. It was like breakup sex, my friends teased, except that it wasn’t like that at all. The blind man played the flute beautifully, but as far as the sex went, he was clumsy and rough.

  When I woke up after our lovemaking, he handed me a photograph: “Tell me what you see here,” he said. The picture was bright and blank, as if he had pointed his camera at the sun or the surface of a lake. I had a terrible feeling that this was what the blind man saw, but that he couldn’t put it into words since it was the only thing he’d ever seen. “Why are you leaving?” he inquired when he heard me snapping my shirt. “Not disturbing, is it?” It scared me to tell him that it was both dark and bright at the same time, nothing and something. I had enough problems of my own.

  Meanwhile, of course, the woman was waiting.

  “Why are you here?” I wanted to put on my wig before having a lengthy conversation with this stranger, but the Styrofoam head was bald. Then I remembered I was already wearing it. “Was I expecting you?” I said, twirling a strand of hair. Doing this soothed me.

  “We had an appointment,” she answered, shaking her head in an exasperated way. Her brow scrunched together, and she moved the head both up and down and sideways. It must have taken her a long time to master the gesture with her hands, instead of her neck. “I can check my calendar …”

  “I believe you,” I said, even though I didn’t. I had a terrible premonition that she was peddling something, like knives, that her head was a prop that she would use in her sales routine. I imagined her pitch: “I’ll cut off my head before your very eyes. Slides through gristle, clean as a whistle.”

  She sat down. It was strange to see the head lodged in the V of her legs and tilted back, looking both up and forward, as if it belonged to a body lying in a dentist’s chair. “It’s a cave in here.”

  “It’s because you’ve been outside in the sun,” I answered. “Your eyes will adjust.”

  “They won’t, actually. My pupils don’t dilate. It’s a rare condition. Not that it’s terribly severe, but it can be a nuisance. The worst part is that I can’t see in the dark. In fact, I prefer light of the kind that today has brought us. Bright, glaring light. Then everything appears crystal clear.”

  “Can you see me?” I asked.

  The woman tilted the head forward. “Say something again, please.”

  “I’m without hair.” I had forgotten the word to describe myself.

  “Bald?” She turned the head slightly so that it was more or less looking in my direction. “I can see the outline of you. But your features are blurry. Is there a reason you can’t turn on a light or two? It would help me immensely.”

  My hands twisted into a knot in my lap. Before this woman’s arrival, before my headache, I’d been trying to remember something about the type of car that I’d rented in Spain ten years ago. My friend Lilly and I had driven around Spain for over a month in the kind of car that didn’t have a top. It was frustrating. I could remember the feeling of the wind in my hair, as if a giant hand were collecting it in a ponytail, and I could recall the smells, the hot brittleness of southern Spain and the heaviness of Barcelona, and I could see the straw-colored fields that ran to the edges of the walled towns. One of them boasted a Roman aqueduct built without a speck of mortar. I couldn’t fathom how I could remember such an odd and unnecessary word like aqueduct, but it was lodged in my head, along with ambivalent, catatonic, deracinate, contumacious, petard, noctilucent, leman, fillip, and countless other words that I once memorized for standardized tests but never used in conversation. These words were like packing peanuts in my brain, burying the real goods (like the word for a car without a top) so deep that I’d never be able to pull them out. Each day, I seemed to spend more time up to my elbows in the box, senselessly grasping at anything I could touch.

  I had thought about calling Lilly before my headache came and asking her about the car, but I had bothered her last week, phoning her up to find out the word to describe her and her sister, people who are born at the same time to the same mother: twins, she blurted out. She had to run but said she would call back soon. You could say I was a twin: me before the tumors, and me after. If you looked closely at pictures of her (minus the hair), the resemblance was there, especially in the eyes. Our personalities had diverged, though. She wore high, strappy heels and befriended people everywhere, even on the subway, while I padded around in ballet slippers that my mother gave me and worried that it was obvious when I wore diapers.

  I reluctantly turned on a light. “Is that better?”

  “Yes, now I can see.”

  “What business do we have?” I asked.

  “You told me you wanted a disquisition on tears.”

  Here was another word I knew, disquisition. A perfectly useless word that was an obstacle to remembering the te
rm for a car without a top. “Why did I want that?”

  “You didn’t say. You called and made an appointment. I’ve spent over three days doing the research. But if you’re not feeling well, I understand, and we can make an appointment for another day.”

  I could tell the woman was lying. Her shoulders were bunched together again, and the head in her lap was biting its lips.

  “You’re feeling uncomfortable?” she said. “If you’re feeling the slightest bit uncomfortable, I can put on my head pack. Would that be easier for you?”

  It was true. I didn’t know where to look when she was speaking. My natural inclination was to focus on her shoulders, but her head wasn’t there.

  “Would it be inconvenient?”

  “Not at all. Notatall,” she said in a slightly more jaunty voice. “Usually I do put it on, but for some reason, I didn’t this morning.”

  I suddenly wondered how she drove. Maybe mounted on the steering wheel was a giant head-size cup. “When did I call?” I had no recollection of calling her, but it was possible that I had called and forgotten. This happened with increasing frequency—conversations were being misfiled in my short-term memory, or disappearing completely, just as the birds would have vanished after lighting on the pomegranate tree and picking it clean.

  The woman’s body began to quiver and her eyes pinched closed, and she made incomprehensible sounds, something between hiccupping and singing. I felt alarmed.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “The way you’re dressed. That heavy coat on a hot day like this. Now that I can see, I couldn’t help but notice. Oh.”

  The sound was giggling. She was laughing at me. She brought her hand to her mouth to muffle the sound. The gesture was so strange and small. The whole point of giggling into your hand was bringing it all the way from your lap to your mouth. “Oh,” she snorted. It was true that I was wearing my winter parka, the hood trimmed with fur. I was often chilly, even on these hot days.